Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Bob Dylan Available Now
One of our good customers had this to say about a Hot Stamper pressing he purchased recently:
Hey Tom,
Received the LP a few days ago, and thank you. I love Blood On The Tracks. I have 6 copies of it and none of them come near yours. I can stop looking now. Thank you.
Arun,
We love it when our customers take the time and make the effort to do their own shootouts, especially when we win, which is what happens about 98-99% of the time.
More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook
We think that sitting down to play a Hot Stamper pressing — one you find yourself through the shootout process, or one we find for you — is the only way to appreciate its superior sound quality.
A great sounding LP, played on a top quality system, is an immersive experience hard to recreate with anything other than a properly-pressed, properly-mastered vintage vinyl LP.
For those who want to dig deeper into the mysteries of vinyl, consider the three commentaries we’ve linked below:
The uses and abuses of rules of thumb
Some audiophiles use the following rules of thumb when targeting higher quality rock and pop records:
If it’s an English band, get the UK import pressing. If it’s an American band, the master tapes should be here in this country, so the original domestic pressing will be the best.
Hot Stamper Pressings of Soul, Blues, R&B, etc. Available NowThe biggest problems we found in our shootout were:
Some edge to the horn sound, the kind of “detail” that some audiophiles might prefer but that to our ears would eventually be a source of listener fatigue.
Stuck in the speakers low-resolution sound, by far the most typical, in which the ambience and spaciousness of the studio are noticeably compromised.
And lack of bass, which either takes the rhythmic quality out of the music, the drive so to speak, or makes the horns sound thin, which is a not a sound we tend to like, on this album or any other, although most of the audiophiles that I’ve met seem not to mind it all that much.
Much of what passes for clarity in some systems is just a lack of lower mids and thin bass response — woofers too small, not enough of them, the same old story. There are many commentaries on the site concerning this very issue and I recommend you check a few out when you have the time.
Music like this needs full-bodied sound to do what it’s trying to do; you need to be able to move lots of air in your listening room to bring this music to life. You can be sure this band full of horn players was moving huge amounts of air in the studio. Would have loved to be there!
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Saint-Saens Available Now
UPDATE 2026
The review below was written a very long time ago, around 2010 I think. Our understanding of Witches’ Brew has changed radically over the last fifteen years, as you can see from our most recent Hot Stamper offering of the album.
In 2010 we would have struggled mightily to reproduce the Shaded Dog pressings of Witches’ Brew. We had yet to make many of the most important improvements to our system that difficult to reproduce records require in order to sound their best.
Our 2010 Review
The Decca reissue above just happens to have the material found on one of the most famous and sought-after Shaded Dog pressings in the world, Witches’ Brew (shown below), along with one track added, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, conducted by Ansermet. (As a budget reissue, they felt they needed to give you more music in order to get you to buy performances that were no longer current.)
The Decca pressing is tonally much more natural from top to bottom. I used to think that it was the best way to hear the music on Witches’ Brew. Like so much of what happens in the world of records, it is and it isn’t.
Huh?, you say. Okay, here is what I mean. We played a handful of Witches’ Brews over the last year or two, and most of them left a lot to be desired. More than that — most of them were just plain awful. One, and only one, lived up to the hype that surrounds the record.
It was so big and so powerful that I would have had no trouble ranking it with the five best sounding classical recordings I’ve ever heard.
It was a real WOW moment when the needle hit the groove on that one.
This later Decca pressing is made from a copy tape, but it’s CORRECTLY mastered from that tape and therefore sounds worlds better than most originals and all the heavy vinyl reissues. This record I can play and enjoy. Those I cannot.
(A great deal more on the Classic Records repress of LSC 2225 can be found here and here.)
Hot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now
UPDATE 2026
This letter came in many years ago, but the lessons to be learned from Chris’s failed approch to finding a good sounding copy of Sgt. Pepper are no doubt timeless.
Many audiophiles who start collecting records make exactly the same mistakes Chris made, and some percentage of those audiophiles, however small, actually learn from them. Sad to say, it seems that many do not.
In our own humble attempt to rectify the situation, we devote a great deal of time to discussing record collecting on this blog, seeing as how so many audiophiles suffer by going about it in all the wrong ways.
Chris, an erstwhile customer from long ago, sent us a letter describing his search for a good sounding Sgt. Pepper.
The first thing that comes to mind when reading his letter is that many record collecting rules were broken in going about the search the way he did.
But then I thought:
What rules?
Whose rules?
Where exactly does one find these rules?
If one wants to avoid breaking them they need to be written down someplace, don’t they? Wikipedia maybe?
Sadly, no, not at Wikipedia, or any place else for that matter — until now. As crazy as it sounds, we are going to try to lay down a few record collecting rules for record loving audiophiles, specifically to aid these individuals in their search for better sounding vinyl pressings. And by “these individuals” we mean you.
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Paul McCartney Available Now
The best tracks on McCartney’s first album have the quality of LIVE MUSIC in a way that not one out of a hundred rock records do. It sounds like it’s recorded live in the studio, but of course that’s impossible, because Paul plays practically all the instruments himself.
It just goes to show how good a multi-track studio recording can sound when it’s done well.
The recording also has an unprocessed quality which we’ve always found attractive, with some songs sounding more like demos than finished takes, about as far from Abbey Road as it would be possible to get.
In our experience, the real McCartney Magic is only found on the best domestic Apple pressings. We’ve never heard an import that did much for us, and the later CBS issues are hardly worth the vinyl they’re pressed on.
This album, like Unplugged and Band on the Run (and not a whole lot else) is SUPERB from start to finish. At the end of side two you want MORE. I wish I could say that about the rest of his discography.
Record Collecting for Audiophiles from A to Z
Jack contacted us recently about doing shootouts for the kinds of records that we rarely do shootouts for:
Hello Tom,
I am thinking about opening an online record store based on the same hot stamper methodology as Better Records, only I focus on genres that you do not cover, such as rap, metal, punk, hardcore, post-punk, noise and other niche genres.
Thus I am trying to get a sense of what it would take to make this project work. Did you have a reputation in the audiophile community prior to starting Better Records that drove people to your store?
The other question I am wondering is about equipment. Do you think that one has to have extremely high-end equipment (e.g., $5000 tone arms and the like) to properly tell whether a record is a hot stamper?
Finally, do you think that your methodology could work on LPs released post-1990, when there are far fewer variants of an album available? Any insight you could offer would be much appreciated.
Regards, Jack
Jack,
You need to follow our approach to the letter. The basics of it can be found here.
For a deeper dive, here is where you will find more helpful advice on doing your own shootouts
This would be a good budget to start with:
Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now
One thing we noticed this time around was that for some tracks James’ vocals are recorded in a booth and for others they are not. Listen to the first track — there is no ambience, no room around his voice whatsoever. He’s in a padded booth, and they sure padded the hell out of it. Now play Long Ago and Far Away on side two. No booth! Lots of studio space around the vocal. MUCH more natural acoustic.
We don’t have the luxury of playing every track on both sides for these shootouts. We pick two or three songs that have specific qualities we know to look for and play them on every copy. (Shootouts like this almost always involve at least a dozen pressings, sometimes more, and it’s impossible to keep them all straight with more copies than that.)
So here’s a potentially fun exercise — assuming you find this sort of thing fun — that we thought about doing but just don’t have the time to devote to at present, with so many other shootouts waiting in the wings. Take your own copy, assuming you have at least a decent one, and play each track listening for only one thing: does James sound like he is in a booth, or does he sound like he is in an open space in the studio? If you have the typical original WB pressing you will probably not be able to get very far and will be quickly tempted to give up, the frustration of a murky midrange being more than most of us audiophiles can bear.
But maybe you have a good copy; the possibility certainly exists. And if you find much success with this exercise we encourage you to drop us a line, we will be more than happy to print it.